defeats

first imacon scan 35mm (again)

a few days ago we watched robin hood. the new one by ridley scott. it stinks. it really is long and boring and is absolutly a 3 hours long preview of the next movie in the series. what a waste. it did however inspire some hours of wiki reading wich at some point i already have done about these same topics, robbyn hoyde and so on in yaey olde eanglyshe. i find the middle ages fascinating, that is to understand how they did all those things they did with the thechnoligy of the time. no GPS to navigate the mediteranian with crued ships. how did theytransport food and how did they make swards and bows and build more then one story building. i guess the movies over state that poeple were dirty but pay little attention to how poeple actualy lived and faught wars. its still exciting. then we went to boston to drop off more stuff at the house and measure a few windows again, only to find that the land lady has not yet done anything to promote us being able to move in before june 1st. whatever. lior called me just as we were sitting down for lunch to tell me that the scanner had arrived. no one had told me its one the way so i dident expect it. needless to say, we rushed to get it and i set it up as soon as i got home and made a SCAN - yes it worked!!! ITS ALIVE i yelled as the negative carrier was pulled in slowly but surly. that 35mm scan was A OK, even at 60MB. then i said well lets see how it fares with 6X7. so i scanned a frame from the mamiya. man these negatives are dir T.

medium format scan, Tess with Efi and Miriam, Jerusalem April 09

but after a  preview went well, the scan started and the scanner was making some kind of uncharacteristic for an imacon to make ticking sounds as it pulled the carrier in. i said, hey its just been adjusted and needs to be broken in. the ticks were represented in smudge lines across horizontally, i guess as the motion of the scan was not smooth. so i moved in closer and tried again. the first time the ticking started at 70%.

the first scan at 85% pixels, see the horizontal lines on the right of the sunglasses.

the second time the ticking started at 30% then again at 60%.

second scan, same position, note the lines are now all over the place...

the third was ticking all along, and you get the point, from there on it was kinda the same. another problem, is that SCSI connections are not very stable under windows, especially when they are being converted with a silly converter box in to firewire, another unstable protocol. and that means that if the computer goes in to hibernate it will loose the SCSI address of the scanner and the whole system will need to be restarted at least once or twice or more just to get the scanner recognized under XP. a few scans later the negative carrier was not fully lodged in and the scanner went back to its banging noises of past. at this point i was sure there is somthing not so ok with it. after some scans and no change i gave up and called hasselblad (who now owns imacon and fixes them). the tech that fixed the scanner had left at 3pm i called in at 3:15. but they said he will call tommorow. on another note, boston again seems to be nicer and nicer with more stuff that is nice and easy for to accept.